Opinion: The true cost of Iran’s nuclear gamble

On Thursday, following consultations with G7 leaders, President Joe Biden said that the United States would not support direct strikes on Iran’s nuclear installations. Although he recognized Israel’s right to respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attacks, Biden called for a “proportional response.” While critics can blame Biden for failing to secure a cease-fire, release hostages or facilitate deliveries of humanitarian aid, he deserves enormous credit for seeking to prevent the humanitarian and environmental catastrophes unleashed by strikes against nuclear sites.
Sadly, the world is not immune to nuclear, industrial and environmental disasters. But conventional strikes involving the aerial bombardment of nuclear sites can be far more devastating than Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island or Bhopal. The damage from such strikes is total and irreversible. It leaves no time for intervention, no chance for evacuation and no possibility for containment.
As early as 2012, in a report titled “The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble” published by Omid for Iran in conjunction with the Hinckley Institute of Politics, we used a Gaussian Plume model to estimate the human costs of military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Although some military planners assumed that the target set for strikes against Iran would extend to more than 400 targets, we limited our analysis to four targets: Isfahan, Natanz, Arak and Bushehr. We did not include the deeply buried Fordow site near Qum. Even in the most conservative of strike scenarios, total casualties at all four sites can range from 5,000 to 85,000.
Few cities would pay as high a price for the Islamic Republic’s nuclear gamble as Isfahan. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), from 2004 to 2010, the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) had produced in excess of 371 tonnes of uranium hexafluoride. These compounds are classed as acidic poisons that form hydrofluoric acid when they come into contact with bodily fluids. In lethal concentrations, they attack the lungs, eyes, skin and tissue. With the city of Isfahan less than 10 miles from the facility and prevailing wind directions blowing in a westerly direction at speeds of 9-13 miles per hour, a toxic plume would reach Isfahan’s suburbs in less than an hour. While there are no reliable figures about the current stock of uranium hexaflouride held in Isfahan, assuming no change in the stock of uranium hexafluoride and a 5-20% casualty rate among these populations, at a 1-20% release, we can expect casualty rates in Isfahan and its suburbs in the range of 5,000 to 70,000 people.
What advocates of military strikes against Iran fail to appreciate is the deadly and deceptive nature of the Ayatollah’s nuclear gamble. At the heart of this misconception is a failure to recognize that Iran’s leaders have no interest in protecting the life or defending the interests of the Iranian people. On the contrary, as with their eight-year war with Iraq, Iran’s leaders view a war with Israel and the United States as a “divine blessing.”
In their apocalyptic calculus — a perversion of Shi’ism — what sustains the Islamic Republic is a holy war: an ideology of victimhood and sacrifice premised on the destruction of Israel and the martyrdom of the Iranian people. In this context, Iran’s nuclear program serves as a stage for the reenactment of a religious drama in which the United States and Israel are portrayed as the Great and little Satan, with the Ayatollah cast as the deputy of the Mahdi guarding the Iranian people and the Islamic world against foreigners.
Mr. Netanyahu should resist the urge to convert Iran’s nuclear program into a bloody stage upon which the Ayatollah will shed crocodile tears on the burned and bloodied corpse of Iran’s martyred children and proxies. Military strikes are no substitute for strategic vision and no guarantee of political victory. Mass casualties will allow the Ayatollah to win his nuclear gamble, with the Iranian people assuming the cost.
Instead of repeating Saddam’s disastrous mistake by underestimating the depth of the Iranian people’s nationalism, Israel and the United States should recognize, expose and disrupt the Ayatollah’s narrative — his gamble with the life of Iran and Israel’s children. The old man is nothing but the cheapest of religious usurpers, a preacher of enmity and hatred, a sorcerer who has cast a spell on the Islamic world to profit from the death of Israel’s sons and prey on the corpse of Iran’s daughters. He is a follower of Machiavelli, not the Mahdi.
Rather than bind the children of Iran, Israel and the Arab world to a future of war, let’s create a coalition for peace, one that denies clerics the ability to turn Iran’s “woman, life, freedom” movement into its antithesis: “mullah, murder and mayhem.”
Khosrow B. Semnani is the author of “The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble.” Amir Soltani is the author of “Zahra’s Paradise.”